As I approach the five year anniversary of this blog, I got to wondering just what my post frequency is and how it might affect my overall readership. In my examination of that data, I learned an important lesson about content and traffic: if you build it, they will come.
My Posting Habits
As you can tell from the above graph, for the first, oh, three years, my posting was sporadic at best. In the first 36 months of existence, I posted a total of 16 times, averaging about 0.4 posts per month. Even worse, 9 of those posts occurred in 3 months. That means, a little over half of my posts were generated in what amounts to 8% of the total time period.
With some inspiration from my former CTO, Raghu Chakravarthi, I committed to both steady and increase my writing in June of 2021. And the numbers show that initiative: in the 19 months from June 2021 to December of 2022, I posted 54 times, increasing my average to 2.8 posts per month. In addition to more posts, I started creating LinkedIn posts to go along with my blog posts, in the hopes of generating some traffic to the site.
People!!
I have the free version of Google Site Analytics hooked up to get an idea of traffic month of month. While I do not get a lot of history, I can say that, in recent months, my site traffic continues to grow, even if it’s only by 40-50 unique users per month.
Most of this traffic, though, has been generated not through my LinkedIn posts, but through Google searches. My top channels in the last two months are, far and away, organic search:
This tells me that most people find my site through a Google search, not my LinkedIn posts.
Increasing Visibility
My experience with my home blog has inspired a change in approach to the visibility of my architects at work. I manage a handful of architects, and there have been several asks by the team to create conduits for informing people about our current research and design work. In the past, we have tossed around ideas such as a blog post or a newsletter to get people interested. However, we never focused on the content.
If my home blogging has taught me nothing else, it is that, sometimes, content creation is a matter of quantity, not quality. Not everything I do is a Pulitzer prize-winning piece of journalism… Ok, NOTHING I write is of that level, but you get the idea: Sometimes it is simply about putting the content out there and then identifying what people interests people. When I switched my blogging over to focus less on perfection and more on information sharing, I was able to increase the amount of content I create. This, subsequently, allowed me to reach different people.
So, if it worked at home, why not try it at work? My team is in the middle of creating content based on their work. It does not have to be perfect, but we all have a goal to post a blog post in our Confluence instance at least once in a two week period. Hopefully, through this content generation, and some promotion by yours truly, we can start to increase the visibility of the work our team does to those outside of the team.
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